This large, impressive composition bears all of the stylistic traits characteristic of an artist working in seventeenth-century Rome under the influence of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). The dramatically cropped figures, pushed precipitously close to the picture plane, are rendered with somber realism, an effect heightened by the theatrical use of chiaroscuro and the removal of nearly all background elements. Typical of work produced in Baroque Rome, the religious scene, anchored in physical reality, conveys a sober tone of spiritual and ethical verity, an artistic prerogative central to the Counter Reformation.

Caravaggio’s paintings came to serve as an essential reference point for artists from throughout Europe. Painters from France, Flanders, and Spain flocked to Rome in the first half of the seventeenth century to study the works he had produced for patrons in the Eternal City. Chief among these Caravaggisti were Valentin de Boulogne, Bartolomeo Manfredi, Giovanni Baglione, and Orazio Borgianni, but an entire generation of artists internalized Caravaggio’s tenebrist style, adapting and modulating it to make it their own. The mocking of Christ was an especially popular subject among his followers. As in this work, in which Christ, demeaningly dressed in royal crimson robes, is beaten with bamboo reeds and adorned with a crown of thorns, the scene served as an emotive vehicle for painterly expression.